WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Pakistan Is ... (BARRY BEARAK, December 7, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

To be honest, Pakistan frightens me. Not the being there, despite recent attacks on foreigners, despite what happened to Daniel Pearl. I have visited Pakistan a few dozen times since 1998, most recently for five weeks this fall. Almost always I've found the people warm and generous and protective. Rather, what greatly alarms me is Pakistan as a potential meltdown, a nuclear power with too many combustibles in the national mix.

I am hardly alone in my fears -- and yet this nation rarely finds itself under the American magnifying glass. ''Pakistan is an incredibly important country, but I don't think there's an awareness of that in the United States,'' Richard Haass told me. He had recently left the Bush administration as director of policy planning in the State Department and assumed the presidency of the Council on Foreign Relations. ''If you'd ask most people what are the biggest issues in the world, they'd say the Middle East, Iraq, North Korea, perhaps Afghanistan, a long list. But not a lot of people would say Pakistan.'' He, too, has pondered the dangerous skein of possibilities. ''Sure to be a nightmare is a breakdown in order. They haven't institutionalized succession in any meaningful way. At worst, you could have a loss of control over their nuclear weapons.''

Pakistan has a population (150 million) larger than all but five nations and more nuclear warheads (perhaps 50) than all but six or seven. Since its establishment, it has been in want of a coherent national identity: some there sarcastically call it less a nation than a crowd. Born in 1947, it was awkwardly excised from the British Empire in two separate pieces, an east and a west that happened to be 800 miles apart, with the largely Hindu behemoth of India situated in between. This new nation was meant to be the Muslim homeland of the subcontinent, but the formal role of Islam was left ambiguous and has ever remained an issue. Religion alone proved insufficient glue. In 1971, Pakistan's eastern half went its own way after Bengali Muslims -- with India's assistance -- broke loose and created Bangladesh. Four contiguous provinces remain: Baluchistan, Punjab, the Northwest Frontier and Sindh. Significant numbers of the present citizenry feel their greater bond is to ethnicity -- be it Pashtun or Baluchi or Sindhi -- and would rather not be part of Pakistan at all. Also under Islamabad's control is Azad (''Free'') Kashmir, one-third of a lovely Himalayan territory claimed by both the Indians and Pakistanis. The dispute is the main reason these neighbors continue to kill one another.

Though the British are long gone, the Pakistanis themselves remain colonized by privation. About two-thirds of the population survives on less than $2 a day. Nearly two of every five children are undernourished. Only 44 percent of all adults can read (only 29 percent of the women). The mosques, rather than the government, provide what frayed social safety net there is. Perhaps that is because Pakistan is habitually broke. Barely 1 percent of the population pays income tax. More than half of the central budget goes toward the military and repayment of the national debt.

Politically, Pakistan has been reliably unsteady, with democracy only a sporadic presence. The military has controlled the country for about half its 56 years. No elected government has ever completed a full term, and even when one is in place, it stays there only at the pleasure of the generals. The army -- some 500,000 strong -- is commonly thought to be Pakistan's elite institution. The military doesn't just dominate civilian affairs; its various ''welfare trusts'' are among the nation's largest industrial conglomerates. The Fauji Foundation, linked to the army, has substantial ventures in gas fields, sugar mills, a fertilizer plant, an oil terminal and an overseas employment service. Its corn flakes and other breakfast cereals control 80 percent of the market. Profits supply ex-servicemen and their families the quality schools and health care that most Pakistanis so badly lack.

The great murkiness of Pakistan is largely the fault of this formidable army and the skulking I.S.I., which have pursued furtive alliances with many of the nation's most violent Islamic extremists. For more than a decade, the military has trained and financed civilian jihadis who cross into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir to create havoc. This guerrilla combat was once an entirely indigenous Kashmiri rebellion against New Delhi, but the Pakistanis quickly hijacked it. Radical groups supplied much of the manpower, often enlisting students eager to enter paradise through the golden door of a martyr's death. The relentless havoc has time and again nudged the two new nuclear powers close to war. The alliance between the army and I.S.I. on one hand and extremists on the other has also led to a contorted set of cross-dependencies. Loyalties are now confused, and many Pakistanis wonder whether fundamentalist elements in the army's officer corps are more sympathetic to the jihadis than to their own superiors.

The first order of business in Pakistan should be for us and the Indians to secure and remove its nuclear weapons. The final order of business is going to be depopulating the Western tribal regions that border Afghanistan.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 6, 2003 10:43 AM